London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690–1800

by Tim Hitchcock, Robert Shoemaker

London Lives is a fascinating new study which exposes, for the first time, the lesser-known experiences of eighteenth-century thieves, paupers, prostitutes and highwaymen. It charts the experiences of hundreds of thousands of Londoners who found themselves submerged in poverty or prosecuted for crime, and surveys their responses to illustrate the extent to which plebeian Londoners influenced the pace and direction of social policy. Calling upon a new body of evidence, the book illuminates the lives of prison escapees, expert manipulators of the poor relief system, celebrity highwaymen, lone mothers and vagrants, revealing how they each played the system to the best of their ability in order to survive in their various circumstances of misfortune. In their acts of desperation, the authors argue that the poor and criminal exercised a profound and effective form of agency that changed the system itself, and shaped the evolution of the modern state.

Open Access Electronic Edition at londonlives[dot]org[slash]book

Genres: History, Nonfiction

480 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 31, 2014

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Tim Hitchcock has degrees from the University of California at Berkeley (1980) and the University of Oxford (1985). He began his academic career at the then Polytechnic of North London, where he taught early modern social history and humanities computing from 1989 onwards, searving as Head of the History group from 1992. In 1997 he took up a Readership at the University of Hertfordshire, where he served as Dean of Research for Humanities and Education, and from 2003, as founding director of the Social Science Arts and Humanities Research Institute. He was awarded a Professorship in Eighteenth-Century History in 2001; and was appointed Professor of Digital History at the University of Sussex in 2013; and co-director of the Sussex Humanities Lab in 2015.

Hitchcock has published twelve books on the histories of gender, sexuality and poverty focussed primarily on eighteenth-century London. With Professor Robert Shoemaker and others he has also created a series of websites helping to give direct public access to 37 billion words of primary sources evidencing the history of Britain. Designed to underpin the writing of a new 'history from below', these sites include: The Old Bailey Online, 1674 to 1913 (www.oldbaileyonline.org); London Lives, 1690-1800 (www.londonlives.org); Locating London's Past (www.locatinglondon.org); and Connected Histories (www.connectedhistories.org). Jointly with Robert Shoemaker, in 2011 he was given the History Today, Trustees' Award for his contribution to historical research. Hitchcock was a founding member of the AHRC Advisory Board and Peer Review College, and is currently a member and past chair of the AHRC's Digital Transformations Advisory Group. He also sits on the British Library's Advisory Council. From 2012, he has been Co-Investigator on the AHRC funded project: The Digital Panopticon: The Global Impact of London Punishments, 1780-1925.

-- from http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/336034

Reviews

[K. G. Whitehurst · Rating 4 out of 5]

This work is an evidence-heavy analysis of the changes in poor relief, vagrancy, and policing over the course of the 18th century, very much aimed at a specialist audience, and while it is not an easy read, it is an important one. From the more tolerant and less formal late Stuart and early Hanoverian means of relieving paupers of their dress and controlling crime to more the rigid structures of relief (with a good dose of financial NIMBYism), the criminalization of poverty, and harsh penalties of the Bloody Code (200+ death penalty offenses by the end of the century), the poor continuous developed strategies and tactics for dealing with the changing social and legal systems. London's plebeians never lacked agency, even as authorities grew increasingly bureaucratic and penny-pinching in their poor relief, and heavy-handed, if not draconian, in their policing and prosecution, particularly from the 1760s forward. Neither Sir John Fielding nor Jonas Hanway are heroes, even if they are significantly less obnoxious in their beliefs about the poor than say, Patrick Coloquon, who, at the end of the century, believed in the inherent criminality of the poor, said so quite bluntly, and acted upon it as a magistrate.

For those who would like less heavy introduction to the English legal system the 18th century, I suggest TALES FROM THE HANGING COURT by Shoemaker and Hitchcock. For those who want a look at the primary sources the books are based upon, I suggest you look here--https://www.dhi.ac.uk/projects/london...